Apple News App – A First Look

With the release of IOS 9 Beta3, Apple has made their new “News” app available for the first time. We’ve been looking forward to to checking it out since it was first unveiled at WWDC 2015, and here are our first impressions.

When you first launch the Apple News app, it asks you to select your interests from an extensive list of magazines and topics. After making your selections, the app assembles your magazine and opens the default view, simply titled “For You”:

This magazine navigates smoothly vertical swipes, with individual articles accessible via a tap. The app is smooth and fast, right out of the gate.

An alternate view is accessible under “Favorites”, which offers all the sources and topics you selected during the initial setup process, as individual sections, as seen below.

Selecting a topic or source brings up that page, as seen below with the New York Times page. The design is clean and the function is smooth.

It looks to us like Apple is off to a great start. The app itself is smoother and better looking than the (formerly great) Zite or Flipboard or Yahoo News Digest, to name a few big competitors. The app does suffer from the same issue as the others, where a given data source – such as the New Yorker – may require their articles to be opened by additional clicks rather than appearing upon first opening the article. This is clunky and hurts the overall experience, but it’s the reality of the way the sources setup their feeds at this time.

On the downside, we did experience several “semi-crashes” of the app, where the app doesn’t actually crash, rather the reader gets kicked out of it and needs to click their way back to where they were, but then, this is beta software, remember. It also should be pointed out that this happens in several different apps under the IOS 9 betas, so it’s probably not an Apple News issue at all.

We look forward to getting to know the new Apple News app better, and will bring you updates as we discover more about it.